De la servidumbre a la libertad: Spinoza sobre la excelencia humana

Eugene Marshall

LeBUFFE, Michael. From Bondage to Freedom: Spinoza on Human Excellence, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010, 253 pp.

Michael LeBuffe's From Bondage to Freedom: Spinoza on Human Excellence is an excellent presentation of Spinoza's moral theory. LeBuffe presents and analyzes not only the moral theory itself but also its place in Spinoza's system. This book is a significant contribution that ought to be read by anyone interested in the ethics or moral psychology of early modern philosophy, in addition to Spinoza scholars.

Consider Spinoza's Ethics. How does one approach such a monumental work? One could say that readers should begin at the beginning. This tactic mirrors many interpretations of his work, in that readers often interpret its later parts in terms of the earlier doctrines. To be sure, such a method can lead to profound results. For example, Michael Della Rocca's recent book, Spinoza, interprets Spinoza's system from the perspective of the principle of sufficient reason, which appears in the second axiom of Part One and, more clearly, a few pages later in the 11^th proposition, allowing him a powerful and informative lens with which to view Spinoza.

This is not the only avenue of entry into Spinoza's system, however. Instead of beginning at the beginning, one may skip ahead to the end and see whodunit. Indeed, several considerations justify such an approach. For one, Spinoza's system is synthetic and geometric in form: geometric in that it proceeds like a demonstration from Euclid's Elements, employing deductive inference from axioms and definitions to propositions; and synthetic in that it begins at the simplest concepts and builds up to something more complex, ostensibly the aim of the demonstration. The Ethics culminates with a discussion of the highest human good, suggesting that this doctrine may be the aim of Spinoza's project, the earlier parts having been presented in service to this end. What's more, Spinoza himself claims that his goal is, ultimately, to lead us to "knowledge of the human mind and its highest blessedness" (Preface, Part II). So, another way to read the Ethics is to begin with its end in mind.

Michael LeBuffe takes such an approach, presenting an interpretation of Spinoza's thought that puts these considerations at the forefront. By focusing on Spinoza's moral theory, LeBuffe provides the reader with two benefits: first, his focus affords us a valuable lens through which to view Spinoza's system; second, his explanation demonstrates the appeal of Spinoza's moral theory in its own right.

According to LeBuffe, Spinoza's moral theory brings together several disparate strands of Spinoza's thought, strands with which commentators have wrestled for some time. The first

strand concerns Part III's conatus, the striving to persevere in our being that constitutes our essence. Throughout Part III and into Part IV, Spinoza describes this essence as a striving to persevere in our being, where that is understood as whatever increases our power of acting. Spinoza builds a value system onto this story, whereby that which increases our power and thus aids our persevering is good and that which does not is bad. By the time we reach Part V, however, Spinoza has switched his terminology, understanding good and bad in terms of knowledge and ignorance, or activity and passivity of the mind. LeBuffe states the issue as follows, saying, "What is the relationship between these two ends of human action, perseverance in being and knowledge?". The answer to this question lies at the heart of LeBuffe's project here. 

Spinoza: El principio de razón suficiente (en inglés)

Michael LeBuffe

DELLA ROCCA, Michael. Spinoza, Routledge, New York, 2008, 341 pp.

Spinoza is at once an excellent introduction to Spinoza's philosophy and a major contribution to Spinoza scholarship. The book's central theme, the prominence and systematic importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza’s thought, contributes to both of these qualities. For undergraduate philosophy students it serves as a working interpretative thesis through which some of the most difficult claims of Spinoza's philosophy -- for example, that self-destruction is impossible, or that conceptual dependence just is causal dependence -- may be evaluated and understood. For Spinoza scholars, Della Rocca's claim that Spinoza is driven to a particular kind of argument by the demand for explanation and a concomitant rejection of brute facts offers an appealing, unifying interpretation of the Ethics and elements of Spinoza's political philosophy. Rigorous treatments of Spinoza's philosophy, either because they tend to tackle the difficult claims of the Ethics in isolation from one another or because they devote themselves to one subject while bracketing others, tend to de-emphasize an important test for the plausibility of an interpretation of one of Spinoza's positions: its consistency with other positions in the book and its usefulness as a tool in helping us to understand those positions. Della Rocca's emphasis on the PSR reverses this trend. On Della Rocca's account, Spinoza's insistence that absolutely everything is intelligible explains important elements of his metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, political theory and eschatology. Spinoza will challenge scholars who disagree with Della Rocca to develop equally clear and well-grounded alternative accounts of what is characteristic of Spinozism, a formidable task.

The book is well-organized and offers several features that make it accessible to those who are new to Spinoza. Each chapter has a clear structure and includes, at the end, a summary and well-chosen suggestions for further reading. Chapter One introduces the PSR, focusing on its "twofold use" in the Ethics (which Della Rocca takes to characterize Spinoza's rationalism) and arguing that Spinoza's naturalism follows straightforwardly from the PSR. Della Rocca holds that E1p11d2 (that is, Ethics, Part 1, Proposition 11, Demonstration 2) contains the clearest instance of the PSR in Spinoza's writings: "For each thing there must be assigned a cause or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." The twofold use of the PSR, to which I will return below, is first, a demand for an explanation of a given fact, and second, an explanation of the fact at issue in terms of explanation itself. Naturalism -- which here means the view that all things, including all human beings, are governed by the same principles -- follows from the PSR, according to Della Rocca, because any local principles, such as any principles which applied to human beings alone, would be inexplicable. Chapter One also includes a brief biography.

Ética de Spinoza: Una introducción (en inglés)

Michael LeBuffe

NADLER, Steven. Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, 313 pp.

Spinoza's Ethics is a recent addition to Cambridge's Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts,

a series developed for the purpose of helping readers with no specific background knowledge to begin the study of important works of Western philosophy. Steven Nadler accomplishes that aim admirably. He covers nearly every major position in the Ethics, including very difficult topics that are often neglected in the literature but which often interest or puzzle readers of Spinoza, such as the distinction between mediate and infinite modes in Part 1 of the Ethics or the account of the eternal part of the mind in Part 5.He does so, moreover, using a number of different tools likely to make the book of interest to a variety of readers. The book includes a clear, concise biography of Spinoza. Nadler makes numerous comparisons to Descartes, who was Spinoza's most important influence as well as a figure that may be more familiar to many readers. Where it is appropriate, he also introduces other important influences on Spinoza, including Cicero, Maimonides, and Hobbes. He compares discussions in the Ethics to parallel discussions in Spinoza's other works, making especially good use of Spinoza's letters, which enlivens debate and allows Nadler to raise in the voice of Spinoza's correspondents questions that readers are likely to have themselves. And, in the course of discussing the issues that have been of greatest interest to Spinoza's critics, Nadler refers readers to some of the most important recent work on Spinoza by philosophers, historians, and political theorists. So readers with specific interests in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, ethics, religion, politics, or history will find some hook here to draw them into the Ethics. Nadler's book is comprehensive, engaging, and bright. It is sure to answer the questions that will strike a new reader of Spinoza and to raise new questions and productive lines of inquiry.

The book begins with an account of Spinoza's life. Nadler is the author of the best biography of Spinoza, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and this essay summarizes his account there. Chapter 2, a discussion of Spinoza's geometric method, includes a discussion of the formal apparatus of the Ethics. The highlight of Chapter 2 is an extended discussion of Spinoza's theory of definition in the course of which Nadler argues that Spinoza's definitions in the Ethics ought to be understood as real rather than stipulative definitions. All of the subsequent chapters follow the order of argument of the Ethics. Chapter 3, "On God: substance" describes the argument to substance monism at E1p14 (that is, Ethics, Part 1, Proposition 14) and Spinoza's identification of God with nature. Chapter 4 concerns necessity and determinism. It includes a helpful discussion of the relation of Spinoza's "God" to traditional religious conceptions of God, something that does not interest many philosophical critics of Spinoza but which does continue, three centuries later, to raise eyebrows among undergraduate readers. In Chapter 5, after a brief discussion of Spinoza's parallelism -- the view that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of extended things -- Nadler describes Spinoza's account of the human being and, in particular, the mind/body relation that Spinoza draws out of this central doctrine. Nadler makes extensive and apt use there of a comparison to Descartes. Chapter 6, following along the structure of Part 2 of the Ethics, focuses on epistemological themes: Spinoza's theory of ideas, his account of the three kinds of cognition at E2p40s2, and his identification of will and intellect at E2p49. Chapter 7 summarizes Spinoza's accounts of desire and the passions. It emphasizes Spinoza's naturalism about human psychology and what Nadler characterizes as Spinoza's egoism. Here the main comparison is to Hobbes, whom Nadler also takes to be an egoist. Chapter 8 is an account of some of the central themes of Spinoza's moral theory. One might emphasize any number of near equivalent concepts that Spinoza uses in Part 4 of the Ethics (the good, what reason commands, what is useful, what conduces to self-preservation).Nadler chooses to emphasize virtue and, what he rightly regards as a different kind of concept, Spinoza's model of human nature, the "free man."The chapter also features a brief discussion of Spinoza's political philosophy. Chapter 9 concerns, principally, Part 5 of the Ethics and Spinoza's use there of some of the terms of traditional eschatology, "eternity" and "blessedness."Drawing upon, especially, the medieval Jewish tradition, Nadler offers an interpretation of Spinoza as denying personal immortality.